The design of distributed ship service systems, or distributed systems, integrates concepts of vessel layout, system functionality, and the distributed systems configuration. Understanding the design relationships between these concepts is a critical aspect of investigating and developing design requirements. Thus, in the design of complex naval vessels, the distributed systems configuration, called the physical solution, must be considered in early-stage design activities to ensure that emergent functional requirements are achievable and affordable. To address this, we propose a novel perspective for modeling and investigating physical solutions in the architectural design of distributed ship service systems. Our approach uses scalable network representations of vessel layout and functional relationships within systems to stochastically generate ensembles of distributed system solutions. Ensembles are then evaluated to determine system characteristics, bringing physical solution information into early-stage requirement elucidation. We demonstrate our approach using concept-level vessel knowledge to identify distributed system characteristics, and show the method's usefulness in understanding complex distributed systems design relationships.

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